My Turn: How racism thrived after the war – Concord Monitor

In a recent and valuable My Turn, Katy Burns wrote about the Souths Lost Cause campaign launched several decades after the Civil War. Its efforts to glorify slavery and the Confederacy included the erection of most monuments currently targeted by the rapidly emerging Black Lives Matter movement.

The column speaks of northerners going home to work after the war while southerners sulked for years until launching their campaign, but this jumps over some important matters and I want to describe two of them.

First, the home that northerners returned to was highly racist. The war, after all, was fought over chattel slavery, not over racism, and most northerners shared the racial stereotypes of southerners. Recently I looked at an event in Indiana, the state where I grew up, and it illustrates my point. In 1850, Indiana held a constitutional convention. At it, delegates adopted Article 13 that prohibited Black people from moving to Indiana and also created a fund to remove free Black Indiana residents to Liberia.

Almost every speech during the five-day debate on the Article referred to Black inferiority and white supremacy in terms nearly identical to those of southern defenders of slavery. In 1851, the electorate adopted the new constitution overwhelmingly. Article 13 was voted on separately and adopted 113,828 to 21,873. At least five other northern states adopted equivalent constitutional amendments of legislation at about that time.

My second point is that the South didnt sulk after the war. Its planter elites immediately set out to snatch what victories they could from the jaws of defeat, and they had substantial success. For example, they sought and obtained the return to planters of 850,000 acres of land confiscated by the Union Army, preventing its redistribution to freed men. Planters frustrated the implementation of another land redistribution act, the Southern Homesteading Act.

Their efforts helped curtail the life of the Freedmens Bureau, a remarkable Reconstruction program that helped many ex-slaves gain education, the vote, and work. The program lasted only four years (and its schools an additional three years).

The South lobbied to remove northern troops and end Reconstruction, something it accomplished in a dozen years.

But the biggest challenge to the planter elite was regaining their earlier wealth. Before the War, the South was the richest region in America primarily because of King Cotton. In 1860, for example, cotton accounted for $191 million of the nations $333 million of exports. England, textile capital of the world, bought 80% of its cotton from the South.

Cotton was also vital domestically. For example, the 1860 Census reported that New Hampshire had investments of $23 million in 150 types of industries including over half ($12.5 million) in cotton goods manufacturing. Cotton alone accounted for 12,700 of the states 32,000 manufacturing jobs.

The planters key roadblock to regaining their prior wealth was, of course, the loss of the machines that had made that wealth possible slaves. Yet by 1870, just five years after the end of the War, cotton was again the nations largest export and would remain so until the Great Depression. This amazing victory from the jaws of defeat occurred because the South found an immediate cheap labor substitute for slaves ex-slaves. The story of how this happened is important.

In the decades leading to war, northern abolition efforts intensified; e.g. rapid growth of the Underground Railroad and attacks on slavery such as Uncle Toms Cabin. But during that same period, southern defenses of slavery escalated. Traditional defenses based on God, Nature, prosperity, science, and Christian humanity became more aggressive, but most importantly, the South devised a major, new defense.

It characterized the emerging system of industrial capitalism in the North as wage slavery, criticized it harshly, and argued that its own economic system of chattel slavery was superior and far more humane. The argument was pointed and its rhetoric often acerbic as seen, for example, in these excerpts from early southern sociologist George Fitzhugh. The northern system gives license to the strong to oppress the weak (and creates) the grossest inequalities of condition. Fitzhugh saw the strong as vulgar landlords, capitalists and employers psalm-singing regicides, these worshippers of Mammon (who) think they own all the property (and that) the rest of mankind have no right to a living except on the conditions they may prescribe.

The weak were wage slaves such as women and children (who) drag out their lives (in) the bowels of the earth [i.e. in mines] harnessed like horses. pallid children (who work in) some grand, gloomy and monotonous factory fourteen hours a day, and go home at night to sleep in damp cellars, the same cellars where aged parents too old to work are cast off by their employer to die.

Industrial capitalism created such evils as income ceases if a worker gets sick; laborers are at war with one another; child labor is common; retailers take advantage of ignorance and charge enormous profits; underbidding (by workers) never ceases resulting in wages too low to subsist and ending by filling poor-houses and jails and graves. Frequent riots and strikes were other problems as was widespread begging. One writer noted that you meet more beggars in one day in any street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South.

The imagery of the wage-slave defense is as stark as Harriet Beecher Stowes attacks on slavery, and the arguments are ones that any socialist or union organizer would have made. In fact, these arguments would soon mobilize a progressive challenge to big industrial capitalism in the North beginning in the Gilded Age (1880 1910).

But what is most interesting about this southern attack on wage slavery is that, when the war ended chattel slavery, the South immediately adopted wage slavery in its place. Under slavery, slaves were property controlled by owners. In the new order, ex-slaves were freemen (free employees, sharecroppers, or tenants) controlled by contract.

The new scheme was possible because emancipated slaves deprived of promises of land desperately needed a way to survive and were readily exploited through contractual arrangements. Heres a simple example signed weeks after the wars end:

I, the within-signed woman of color, do hereby bind myself with E. W. Reitzell as laborer on his plantation from this the 1st day of August, 1865, to the 1st day of January, 1866. I further agree and bind myself to do all the work he may require of me, to labor diligently and be obedient to all his commands, to pay him due respect, and do all in my power to protect his property from danger, and conduct myself as when I was owned by him as a SLAVE.

These labor contracts, together with various techniques that forced freed men to renew them, confined millions of black farmworkers to southern plantations for two or three generations beyond the war until the Great Depression and after.

(Paul Levy lives in Concord.)

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My Turn: How racism thrived after the war - Concord Monitor